Package Arrival: The HISSTools Impulse Response Toolbox

Up here in the northern hemisphere, it’s getting increasingly difficult to ignore the shortening of the days that signals the coming of winter. Apart from spending some moments envying our friends to the south who are welcoming summer, those long quiet nights just cry out for Something To Distract Us From The Chill.

In the Max world, those gifts for the long nights have already begun to arrive. By now, I hope you’ve had a chance to peruse Chris Dobrian’s astounding Max/MSP cookbook that we recently profiled here in all its sprawling and instructive glory.

It is once again my pleasure to be the official Herald Of Good Tidings, spreading the word of recent gifts from the Max community to Max users that arrive with more promise of inspiration and productive patching — we can all use a new source of light and heat about now.

Our next festive seasonal package really is a package – a Max package. To take delivery, just fire up Max 8’s Package Manager and feast your eyes a new arrival: Alex Harker, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay and Pete Dowling’s HISSTools Impulse Response Toolbox.

What's In It?

Although this is the first time the Max community has been able to access this amazing collection of MSP objects and abstractions with the ease that the package manager provides, the HISSTools have been with us for a while. Originally created for us with the Huddersfield Immersive Sounds System loudspeaker orchestra (Acronym alert! So that’s there the “HISS” comes from), this collection of MSP tools for working with convolution, deconvolution, and other impulse response-related tasks first appeared and whetted the appetites of MSP users back in 2012 (the ICMC paper that introduced the project to the world is linked inside the package and remains one of the best source from which to begin your explorations). In the years that followed, Max mavens quietly followed the GitHub site, and checked out the appearances of a couple of tutorial videos that showcased the tools in action:

The move to include the HISSTools as a Max package makes it a lot easier for Max users the world over to discover and explore this amazing set of Max resources for themselves. If you have not done so already, it's time to take it for a spin!

What's New?

If you’re one of those Max users who has been following the development of the HISS Tools from the days of its initial appearance in 2014, there’s a lot more to love besides the convenience of being able to use Max’s Package Manager to install and update the toolkit. The HISS Tools package available to you in the package manager is a Version 2.0 update of the tools you know and love.

The update includes a complete new set of reference documentation and updated helpfiles:

You'll also find links to the video tutorial series, a source list for impulse responses, and a number of new Max abstractions, including a new Convolution Reverb effect.

Convolution reverb fans will find a trio of new MSP objects for use with impulse responses: bufresample~ for IR resampling, bufreverse~ for IR reversal, and a morphfilter~ object for IR damping.

Finally, all HISS Tools objects can now access limitless channels of a buffer~ object.

Don't take my word for it - see for yourself. The package manager is just one click away from any Max patcher window (it's that little box icon on the upper left toolbar). Happy patching, everyone!